Anti-family-planning Zealots Hurt, Not Help Third World

April 14, 1985|by PETER H. KOSTMAYER, Sunday Call-Chronicle

The tragedy in hunger-ravaged East Africa has touched an emotional chord in America that is resonating through Congress: In spite of huge federal deficits, the first major bill to pass in this session will likely be a $784- million aid package for Africa.

Incredibly, though, at the same time that U.S. food shipments are being increased, our government is about to slash assistance to combat one of the root causes of the African tragedy - and the cause of malnutrition, hunger and famine in other parts of the world as well: overpopulation.

In a truly misguided and ill-timed effort, right-to-life and anti-abortion zealots are waging an intensive campaign against voluntary family planning in the Third World. And they appear to be winning.

Last month the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed an amendment sponsored by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., that would terminate all U.S. assistance to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, to which we contributed $38 million in 1984. The amendment would also end funding for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the largest private international agency providing family-planning services.

Both of these organizations provide badly needed family-planning services to couples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. If the Senate committee's position prevails, these organizations stand to lose 25 percent of their budgets.

Pro-life advocates claim that Helms' amendment is needed to stop abortion - particularly in China, where coercion is allegedly used to force couples to adhere to its one-child-per-family program. The International Planned Parenthood Federation has an affiliate in China, and the U.N. Fund for Population Activities supports some non-abortion-related, essentially demographic work in China.

But will the halting of funding to these two respected organizations deter abortions?

No. First, U.S. law already says that no U.S. foreign aid may be used to promote or perform abortions. This law has been strictly enforced, and no American dollars areused for abortion or involuntary sterilization in China or anywhere else.

Second, both of these organizations have adhered to U.S. contract standards that insist on voluntarism, not coercion, in dispensing services. The fact that both organizations are represented in China is a positive force, not a negative one, if we are truly concerned about the coercive nature and alleged abuses in China's family-planning program.

This amendment seems a poorly disguised assault on family planning itself. Ironically, its adoption would lead to more abortions as women in Africa, Asia and Latin America who desperately need and want contraceptives are denied them.

The World Fertility Survey shows that while one-half of all married women of reproductive age want no more children, one-half of these same women do not have access to effective methods of family planning. Without access to contraceptives, many women turn to abortion, with horrible results. Illegal abortion is the No. 1 killer of women between the ages of 15 and 39 in Latin America, and a leading cause of maternal mortality in Asia and Africa. One woman dies every three minutes in the world of complications resulting from septic abortion.

Passage of the Helms amendment would only worsen these grisly statistics.

Almost 35 percent of the developing world's people are under the age of 15 and about to enter their child-bearing years. We should be moving to dramatically increase the availability of family planning to young couples if we truly want to decrease abortion.

And only by stabilizing population growth can economic conditions in the Third World improve. In Kenya the average family has eight children, in Bangladesh it has six. The developing world increases by 1 million people every five days. (The developed world adds only 8 million every year.)The economies of these developing countries cannot possibly expand at a rapid enough rate to absorb their phenomenal population growth. Thus sheer numbers are outstripping the Third World's capability to produce food and create jobs.

Pro-lifers and pro-choicers ought to be able to agree that the improved availability of contraceptives would reduce the number of abortions in the Third World. Family-planning assistance is humanitarian, and allows men and women to choose the size of their families before pregnancy, not after.

More important, this aid would help stabilize population growth, and would reduce the likelihood of future tragedies such as the one that we're witnessing in Ethiopia. This is a goal that most Americans agree on, even if Helms and his backers do not.

(Rep. Peter H. Kostmayer, D-8th District, is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee).